Encouraged by the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, Veblen hoped, for a time, that a moment had arrived when the business class was vulnerable. In his last two books, The Engineers and the Price System (1921) and Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise (1923), he surveyed the demise of the proprietary credo—a miscellany of “sentimental, religious, or magical truths,” in his view—and beckoned toward a technocratic replacement.
